HM The Queen’s Official Birthday Reception, Warsaw June 2007

It is always a bad sign when the Embassy Management Section refuses to print any more visiting cards!

This is our last QBP. In a few weeks’ time Helen and I leave Poland and then the Foreign Office, after 28 years’ loyal service. In short, we are being fashionable: we are going to England to look for work.

Jedziemy do Anglii szukać pracy.

So let me start with words of thanks.

Thank you to Basia Kaczmorowska-Hamilton for bringing to our Residence many fine portraits.

Thank you to Mr Lubomir Jarosz for playing our National Anthems.

Thank you to the Czestochowa Pipes & Drums – our Polish Scottish pipers, all the way from Częstochowa.

Thank you to the BT Melodians Steel Orchestra, all the way from UK – just for you

Thank you above all to the four companies – in alphabetical order BT, Cushman & Wakefield, Provident and Tesco – who have generously supported this event.

These fine companies are creating jobs, wealth and innovation in our two countries and beyond.

Since WW2 we have had 21 Ambassadors in Warsaw. They lasted on average only three years each, some only two. Most were totally broken by this Circle/Triangle question. Only six heroic stubborn Ambassadors survived for four years or longer. I am one of them.

Helen and I and our children have been honoured to serve HM The Queen in your country. We have hosted over 20,000 Polish, British and other guests in this Residence. Very few have been thrown out for drunkenness.

The task of building Europe continues. Tomorrow European leaders try to agree a basis for European institutions for the years ahead.

Niech ta praca postępuje w najlepszym duchu twórczego kompromisu

Let this work move forward in the best spirit of creative compromise.

My Embassy team in Warsaw have been closely involved in this issue, and in all these other strategic successes of the past four years. They have done a fine job. Thank you to them.

So there it is. Goodbye Warsaw, Goodbye Foreign Office.

If anyone wants to offer me a job, please can they stay behind afterwards?

Diplomatic relations are not secrets locked up in Foreign Ministries. Diplomatic relations are people. UK/Poland relations are you.

You – our fine veterans, people in politics, the church, in business, art and music, military, police, science, academic, and all the other areas represented here today. My congratulations to you for all you have done – to build new European friendships.

Soon you will see a new British Prime Minister, then a new British Ambassador, Ric Todd and his wife Alison, who arrive here in October.

The personalities change. The warmth of this unusually friendly, special and dynamic bilateral relationship does not.